By Frank Catalano

The future of tablets in our schools may not be coming from Cupertino. Or even the U.S.

Despite the craze around Apple’s iPad, it’s only been two years since the device was introduced, and that may not be enough time to separate fad from trend over the long term in education. And while the iPad’s presence – and promotion by the Apple faithful since its launch in 2010 – is hard to ignore, a winning tablet trend hasn’t been clearly established on a global basis.

It’s certainly true that tablets are on the upswing in K-12 schools and higher education. There’s no shortage of U.S. numbers to cite. Going beyond statistics of tablet penetration (in one case, most recently, 25% of college students and 17% of college seniors), it’s in the composition of purchases where the data can get interesting. For example, a Harris Interactive/Pearson Foundation survey released in March gave iPads the largest share among college students (at 63%), followed by the Kindle Fire (26%) and the Samsung Galaxy Tab (15%).

As U.S. education appears to be moving toward tablets in pockets here and there, other countries’ education officials are embracing them in bulk.

Another way to read those figures: It’s roughly a 60/40 split between Apple’s iOS operating system and all flavors of Android devices (“flavors” might be the right word, as Android has named its more recent OS versions Ice Cream Sandwich and Gingerbread). These relative rankings among popular Android tablets in education mirror the broader U.S. consumer market.

But the scope of some big decisions made by international government agencies – and the price of non-U.S. devices – could upset the apple cart.

Consider India. Last fall saw the launch of the highly touted US$50 Aakash Android tablet for education (subsidized to US$35). That initiative subsequently stumbled following reports the first models built by the UK firm DataWind were sluggish and fragile. The government has since decided to press ahead with a new version with improved specifications.

Yet the overwhelming interest in what was supposed to be a first run of 100,000 tablets has spurred the growth of a handful of new education-focused competitors. They’ve developed tablets that are more expensive, but apparently more capable: the US$100 ATab, US$150 HCL MeTab, and, perhaps most interesting, the US$125 Funbook – interesting in that manufacturer Micromax’s education content partner for the Funbook is the international educational publishing giant Pearson. All of these relatively inexpensive devices run on Android.

Another international initiative of note: One Laptop Per Child’s XO-3, a projected $100 tablet, due this year, with prototypes shown at January’s Consumer Electronics Show. Designed for students in developing countries, it has OLPC’s now-signature hand crank (for when regular power isn’t available) and it, too, runs on Android (or OLPC’s own Sugar OS).

INTERNATIONAL GROWTH

No matter how cheap, having hardware isn’t enough if there isn’t a market. Yet as rapidly as U.S. education appears to be moving toward tablets in a decentralized manner, in pockets here and there, other countries’ education officials are embracing them in bulk.

Thailand’s Ministry of Education has announced plans to provide tablets for all of its first-grade students – 900,000 of them. As part of its Digital Education Revolution program, Australia has provided every 9th-through-12th grade student with either a laptop or a tablet this year – and due to purchases of lower-cost tablets, the number of devices actually outnumber students.

And though doubts have been expressed about providing tablets for the youngest grades, South Korea is still moving ahead with plans to replace K-12 textbooks with tablets starting in 2014.

Regardless of where in the world they’re deployed, tablets present key issues that must be dealt with: Settling on appropriate educational content for a full curriculum, whether to attach a keyboard, and the ideal tablet screen size. While many inexpensive tablets are 7 inches, more expensive models such as the iPad are 10 inches – and that’s the minimum size required, for example, for using tablets for the forthcoming Common Core assessments. Plus, of course, there are the traditional concerns that apply to any technology in education, such as teacher training, using the tech effectively for learning, and cost.

Considering the speed of tech adoption and growth in the past few years, it’s clear that tablets will pervade the education landscape. But it’s too early to foretell which devices, or even operating systems, will last or turn out to be fads.

There’s been speculation for months now — at least since the release of the Steve Jobs biography — about Apple’s plans to take on the textbook publishing industry. And today at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, we finally got a glimpse of what the company has been planning since long before the death of its co-founder.

As Apple’s Phil Schiller noted in his opening remarks today, “Education is deep in our DNA… and has been since the very beginning.” And while that may be true, it was one of the company’s most recent inventions — the iPad — that took center stage today as the ideal learning device, with Apple touting kids’ (of all ages) love and desire for the tablets.

Apple boasted the adoption that iPads have already seen — some 1.5 million iPads already in use at educational institutions, with over 1000 schools having 1:1 iPad programs. Apple also noted the rich app ecosystem that’s been built around the iPad as a learning device — over 20,000 educational apps made specifically for the device.

While the mantra throughout the event was “iPad, iPad, iPad,” the focus of much of today’s event was on textbooks — digital textbooks — and Apple’s insistence that these are “not always the ideal learning tool.” Apple unveiled several new tools that it argued would move the “great content” found in textbooks into a new, interactive, durable, portable format — in other words, move the textbooks onto the iPad.

Reading: Apple introduced iBooks2, an update to its iOS e-book app (which sadly still isn’t accessible on Macs, let alone on Windows machines) that offers a new category specially for interactive digital textbooks. These new e-textbooks contain many of the features we’ve been more accustomed to seeing in interactive e-book apps rather than in the iBookstore — videos, photos, and 3D diagrams, as well as an easy way to highlight passages and take notes. The latter, along with glossary terms, can be transformed into flash cards for studying.

As part of today’s news, Apple announced it was partnering with the Big Three textbook publishers — Pearson, McGraw Hill, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Many of their newly redesigned textbooks are available to purchase today. These new textbooks will cost no more than $14.99, Apple promises, and they’ll be owned by students individually (rather than by the schools and instead of being shared by multiple students across multiple classes and years). That’s a substantial shift to how textbooks are bought and distributed, particularly at the K-12 level, and it’s not quite clear how schools or students will handle these purchases or how this will impact budgeting decisions. After all, schools tend to procure textbooks with the understanding that they’ll last for at least 5 years. That does mean that the content can be out-dated, something that these digital textbooks are meant to combat. But the trade-off, of course, will be purchasing iPads and now purchasing annual updates to books.

Writing: Apple also introduced a new piece of software to allow “anyone” to build their own interactive e-books: iBooks Author. While Ars Technica speculated prior to today’s news that this would be a “Garageband for E-Books,” that doesn’t seem like quite the right description. It’s more akin to iWorks for e-books — an authoring tool that greatly facilitates the layout of e-book content. The drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to add text, photos, video, Keynote slides, and even HTML widgets to build an iBook.

I have “anyone” in quotes because, for the time being at least, this app is Mac (OS X) only. The app itself is free, and after building an e-book, one can upload it to the iBookstore. The textbooks that are built to sell or give away in the iBookstore will be subject to a review process, Apple says, and the company will take its normal “cut” of sales as well as demand exclusivity to their sale. One can bypass the iBookstore by simply emailing the file to another person, who’ll be able to open it with the iBook app.

Courseware: In addition to the new iBooks and iBooks Author apps, Apple also announced a new app for iTunes U. Long a hidden gem of the iTunes Store, iTunes U has provided a way for universities and other educational institutions to distribute course content — primarily lecture videos — via iTunes. With over 500,000 pieces of audio and visual content, Apple says that iTunes U is the “largest catalog of free educational content.” The new iTunes U app adds several new features to the platform, in Apple’s words, to “let teachers do a lot more” including offering “full online courses.”

It’s close to an online learning management system, although it’s worth noting here that since the content on iTunes U has mostly been free and open, that there is no process here for submitting assignments or grades. And much like the new iTextbooks, what’s missing here is a “social” component. The app does allow instructors to upload full course packages, and starting today K-12 teachers will also be able to post their materials to the iTunes U ecosystem.

Game-changer?: Apple’s announcements are often described in hyperbolic terms: “revolutionary,” for example. I’m not sure that we can necessarily apply that adjective here. Considering the involvement of the three largest education publishers — a group that currently controls 90% of the textbook market — I don’t think we can pronounce the textbook industry “digitally disrupted.” Rather, Apple has strengthened its relationship with these publishers who are now able to point to content that they’ve specifically designed to work on the iPad. Their content will continue to appear in other digital formats too, of course, and will likely still be available via other e-textbook apps (such as Inkling and Kno and CourseSmart).

The ability to easily create e-books with the new iBooks Author app does feel like an important innovation, and if Apple can steer authors (students and teachers and “anyone”) to its iBookstore, then it will be in a better position to compete with Amazon’s self-publishing offerings. That’s not necessarily a game-changer for education, however; rather it’s about controlling the future of e-book creation and distribution, something that Apple must compete with Amazon over.

That’s a future that revolves around the Apple publishing and app ecosystem, and it’s a future that relies on Apple hardware too — Macs and iPads. While all of this might make it easier to build, buy, and read beautiful interactive textbooks with these new “free” software tools, that hardware investment might be something that causes a lot of schools to balk.

One of the many things I find fascinating about Steve Jobs’ textured life was his education. From CNET’s obituary:

He attended Reed College in Oregon for a year but dropped out, although he sat in on some classes that interested him, such as calligraphy. After a brief stint at Atari working on video games, he spent time backpacking around India, furthering teenage experiments with psychedelic drugs and developing an interest in Buddhism, all of which would shape his work at Apple.

San Francisco middle school students watch instructional videos on their school-issued iPads.

Apple held a press event today at its Cupertino headquarters, unveiling a variety of improvements to its line of iPods and iPhones, including an update to its mobile operating system and a brand new version of its wildly popular iPhone. As always happens around these Apple announcements, there’s a flurry of excitement — before, during, and after — about what the company will reveal. Other tech companies hold similar press events, sure, but few seem to garner as much buzz as Apple’s.

Some of that allure came from its former CEO. When Steve Jobs announced in August that he was stepping down from his position as CEO, there was a massive outpouring of reflections and analyses by the technology press about the impact that he and his company have had on technology — on both hardware and software. Indeed, it’s hard to understate that impact when you look at the role that Apple played in the development and adoption of personal computers, portable music devices, mobile phones, and tablets. By extension, Apple’s influence has helped usher in new opportunities for digital content in the entertainment and publishing industries.

And, of course, the company has had a huge impact on education. Apple has had a long history of pushing its computers into the classrooms. For many years, a child’s first exposure to a computer had been at school, and often that computer was an Apple. The company made a push back in the 1980s to get its PCs into the classroom, and even with the ascendancy of Microsoft and Windows in the personal computing market, schools have remained a stronghold for Apple.

The shift to mobile devices — first the iPods, then the iPhones, and now the iPads — has once again put Apple in the lead in the consumer market, and it’s interesting to think about how the company continues to be embraced by schools and to influence education. Indeed, Steve Jobs often said that the company exists at the “intersection of technology and the liberal arts,” and as such arguably has had a very different approach to the devices it’s produced — their design and their capabilities — as well as to these devices’ applications and the types of software that runs on them.

The buzz around Apple products often seems to prompt both the company and its users to make sweeping predictions about their “magic” and about their “revolutionary” impact on the world. That’s particularly true for education. On stage today in Cupertino, Apple’s new CEO Tim Cook told the audience that iPads are “showing up everywhere” and that in schools they are “changing the way teachers teach and kids learn, and many educators agree with us.” He added that there is an iPad deployment program in every state.

But as ZDNet’s Christopher Dawson recently noted, “the jury’s still out” on the success of these deployments. Despite the move towards a more paper-free classroom and despite all the new apps and e-books available, it’s hard to know if the adoption of the Apple devices — the tablets as well as iPod Touches — is necessarily changing things. Without adjusting classroom instruction to take full advantage of a one-to-one classroom, many of these schools are just doing the “same old thing” but using more expensive tools to do so. And the operative word here may be “expensive” too.

The idea of a one-to-one classroom does mean that students have their own computing devices, ones they carry with them at all times, at school and at home. That helps support mobile learning opportunities, as students have access to the Internet, to their digital textbooks, to their assignments and so on, no matter where they are. The desirability for Apple devices seems to have pushed forward the one-to-one “buzz” at a level that laptops and netbooks, the devices typically associated with one-to-one, never has.

But Apple’s mobile devices are at their core consumer products. It’s important to remember that its mobile operating system is thoroughly integrated with its App Store, which raises questions about the control of content there. (There is, obviously, still access to the Web on these devices, giving users and developers some opportunity to skirt iTunes.) Despite the rush to adopt Apple devices, it’s still not easy to sync them simultaneously to one administrative account, nor is it possible to blend a school’s iTunes account with a student’s school account with her or his personal account. That may be a great stumbling block for the promise of having a truly personalized computing device with all its associated software and applications.

The promise of a personalized device was the “big reveal” at the end of today’s Apple event, when the company unveiled its plans to integrate the Siri personal assistant technology into its iPhones. Siri allows users to now control many aspects of their iPhones with their voices, including asking research questions (among its resources are Wikipedia and WolframAlpha) and listening to, dictating and transcribing messages.

Of course, personalization in education (and education technology) means a lot more than just having a device that recognizes your voice. It could mean a technology that knows what you “like” (arguably, of course, that’s Facebook). It could mean one that knows your academic strengths and weaknesses — what you could or should be studying. It could mean recommending courses, books, and apps. I’m not sure that the artificial intelligence that underlies the new iPhone personal assistant is a first step towards any of this (not to mention if it’s something that’s possible or something we’d want), but considering the continued love of Apple products by teachers and students, I’m curious to see how the next generation of Apple devices will impact education.

More college are being drawn to computer science degrees because of media’s glamorous portrayal of this traditionally geeky career path, today’s New York Times article suggests. Movies like “The Social Network” and Apple’s slick ad campaigns have created celebrities out of Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs, and with tech company net worth numbering in the billions, choosing computer science is becoming decidedly more intriguing these days.

This year, 11,000 students will be receiving computer science degrees in the U.S., according to the Computing Research Association, the article states.

Universities are pitching the major as not just a practical skills path, but one that could lead to discovery and creativity.

To hook students, Yale computer science professors are offering freshman seminars with no prerequisites, like one on computer graphics, in which students learn the technical underpinnings of a Pixar movie.

“Historically this department has been very theory-oriented, but in the last few years, we’re broadening the curriculum,” said Julie Dorsey, a professor.

She also started a new major, computing and the arts, which combines computer science with art, theater or music to teach students how to scan and restore paintings or design theater sets.

Professors stress that concentrating on the practical applications of computer science does not mean teaching vocational skills like programming languages, which change rapidly. Instead, it means guiding students to tackle real-world problems and learn skills and theorems along the way.

Sounds good to me. But what if kids were offered these kinds of classes beginning in K-12 setting? Perhaps they might not need the lure of fame and fortune to get into the game.

Apple is holding its big developers’ conference this week in San Francisco, and the event kicked off on Monday with a keynote unveiling some of the new products and features Apple has in store. This includes upgrades to both its Mac and mobile operating systems.

Apple also introduced a new product, iCloud that will store users’ music, photos, apps, calendars, and documents online and then push them to all Apple devices, whether they’re iPhones, iPads, iPod Touches, or Macs. The service includes 5 GB of storage for free.

Apple is hardly the first company to make a foray into online storage. But with the popularity of Apple’s products — with consumers in general and with educators in particular — it may be that Apple’s new offering will help popularize the idea of cloud computing, a term that’s familiar in tech circles but still unclear to a lot of consumers.

CEO Steve Jobs took to the stage at the World Wide Developers Conference on Monday to explain Apple’s new service, saying that iCloud was the company’s “next big insight.” Contending that the PC is no longer the “digital hub for your digital life,” Jobs predicted that with iCloud, the company will “demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device” and instead that our digital hub will be “in the cloud.” And if nothing else, iCloud offers a way to demonstrate what cloud computing means: it’s online storage, accessible anywhere from any device over the Internet. All that data will in fact be stored in massive data centers instead of locally on your hard drive.

But what does iCloud mean for education?

Syncing information across devices has great appeal. It means that students and teachers will be able to access their documents, their projects, their videos anywhere, whether they’ve created them at home or in the computer lab or on their mobile phones.

But the major problem with iCloud is that it works only with Apple products. If you use a Mac at school but have an Android mobile phone, or if you use an iPhone but have a Windows computer at school and a Mac at home, then syncing isn’t so seamless. iCloud doesn’t really fulfill the promise of “access anywhere.”

Furthermore, along with the need for people to move their own data across their personal devices, people are increasingly needing to share this information with others. Google Docs and Dropbox, for example, have both seen widespread adoption in schools because of the ability to do just this — collaborate and share — without a restriction on device or operating system.

It may be that Apple has more in store with its iCloud product that will make it better suited for education. The company will have to do precisely this if it wants to be able to compete with other major technology companies that have already made advances on this front, such as Google Apps for Education or Microsoft Live@edu.

Schools are increasingly recognizing the cost savings and efficiencies associated with cloud services (no need for maintaining district servers, for example). But schools should be wary about vendor lock-in here and about selecting cloud services that restrict rather than open the possibilities for collaboration.